Buena Vista High School senior, Berlin VanNess received the $500 second annual Kent Haruf Memorial Writing Scholarship at an awards banquet Sunday, May 7, 2017. VanNess wrote “Running With the Wind,” a creative nonfiction piece. She plans to attend the university of Colorado-Colorado Springs, majoring in biology and pre-med, and to continue writing poetry.

Michael White, a Canon City High School junior, received a $100 honorable mention scholarship and a certificate. White wrote “Banjo and Freedom: Do Your Part,” a fiction piece.

Jennifer Dempsey, daughter of Cathy Haruf, presented the awards on behalf of her mom, who was recuperating from hip surgery. In presenting the awards, Dempsey said, “Kent’s advice to writers was to read everything, write every day and write what you know. Everyone is an expert at their own experience.”

Canon City High School senior Bethanny Lyons was awarded the first annual Kent Haruf Memorial Scholarship at a banquet at The Book Haven in Salida on March 19th, 2016 for her story “The Panhandle Blizzard.”

Haruf’s widow, Cathy Haruf, presented Lyons with her $500 award and a copy of Kent’s last novel, Our Souls at Night, after Lyons read her story to the audience. Lyons also was awarded a writing coaching session with Salida writer Susan J. Tweit. “I’m honored to have received this award and very thankful to meet with a published author,” Lyons said. Mary Reim, Lyons’ teacher at Cañon City High School, was also honored at the banquet.

The Kent Haruf Memorial Scholarship is open to junior and senior high school students in Fremont and Chaffee counties, the two counties Kent called home in Colorado.

Available: May 26, 2015

A spare yet eloquent, bittersweet yet inspiring story of a man and a woman who, in advanced age, come together to wrestle with the events of their lives and their hopes for the imminent future.

In the familiar setting of Holt, Colorado, home to all of Kent Haruf’s inimitable fiction, Addie Moore pays an unexpected visit to a neighbor, Louis Waters. Her husband died years ago, as did his wife, and in such a small town they naturally have known of each other for decades; in fact, Addie was quite fond of Louis’s wife. His daughter lives hours away in Colorado Springs, her son even farther away in Grand Junction, and Addie and Louis have long been living alone in houses now empty of family, the nights so terribly lonely, especially with no one to talk with.

Their brave adventures—their pleasures and their difficulties—are hugely involving and truly resonant, making Our Souls at Night the perfect final installment to this beloved writer’s enduring contribution to American literature.

Almost three decades since his first novel, The Tie That Binds, was published, Kent Haruf says the stories that he writes, invariably set on the high plains of eastern Colorado, have become more mythic than factual, intuitive rather than rational. “I haven’t lived in eastern Colorado for 35 years,” says Haruf, 69, the son of a Methodist minister and a schoolteacher. “I grew up out there. My memory of it is shaped by my experiences decades ago. Memory changes your perspective.”

Haruf’s fifth novel is Benediction. Like the first four novels, it is set in fictional Holt County and delves, in spare, simple prose that many have compared to Ernest Hemingway’s, into the inevitably entwined lives of its rural inhabitants. Haruf considers William Faulkner as the author who perhaps has most influenced him, saying that he likes “to read some Faulkner, Hemingway, or Chekhov before sitting down to write anything.”

Benediction is Haruf’s first novel in eight years. Eventide, his sequel to the 1999 National Book Award nominee Plainsong, came out in 2004. Those two novels, paeans to small-town life, feature characters from multiple generations whose joys and sorrows intersect with those of the McPheron brothers, two aging bachelor farmers whose lives change after they take in a pregnant, homeless teenager in Plainsong.

In terms of showing their emotions and acting on them, my women characters are a lot more advanced than the men.
-Kent Haruf

Haruf introduces completely different characters in Benediction, with a widow and her daughter at the center of stories of ordinary folks trying to prevail under difficult circumstances: an elderly couple deals with the husband’s terminal illness; a young girl moves in with her grandmother after her mother’s untimely death; and an opinionated preacher, newly arrived from Denver, alienates his congregation and family, with consequences for his teenage son that are almost tragic.

Benediction started out as a very different book, Haruf says during a weekend visit to Denver, 150 miles north of his home in the small town of Salida, Colo., where he lives with Cathy, his wife of 17 years. “It was a story about a young woman with a young child driving across Colorado; she ended up stranded in Holt,” he explains. “The story was going to be about what happens when someone’s dependent on the charity of strangers. I got about 100 pages in and then realized I’d already written that story.”

Haruf says he then became interested in two minor characters who had appeared in earlier drafts of the book, “an old couple who lived on the edge of town.” Says Haruf: “The more I thought about them, the more they became the heart of Benediction.”

This is how Haruf conceptualizes all of his creative writing, he says. He muses upon the novel’s primary characters, their lives, and how they contend with their problems because “a main character always has to have problems.” He then builds communities of people around those characters.

“Once I knew about Dad Lewis and his wife, Mary, then I had to think about what kind of family they’d have, who would be their neighbors, their friends in this little town.” Haruf says. “This old man’s dying. The people around him, caring for him, and, of course, the kinds of feelings he had as he knew he was dying—those ideas became the heart of the story.”

Perhaps this ability of Haruf to adeptly move into the heads of the different characters he creates and weave stories about their lives comes from all the living he’s done. After graduating from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1965, Haruf spent the next two years serving with the Peace Corps in Turkey. Since then, he’s worked in rural areas and big cities throughout the Rocky Mountain region and in the Midwest, holding jobs at a chicken ranch, construction site, and railroad, and in hospitals, schools, universities, and an orphanage. He also spent two years at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, receiving an M.F.A. in 1973.

Even though Haruf has set all five of his novels in eastern Colorado, he adamantly rejects the notion that his writings are in any way regional.

“I want to believe there’s something universal about these stories,” he says. “In some ways, what happens in Holt happens in Denver, in Minneapolis, everywhere. Death is a fact of life, no matter where you live. Taking care of the dying is a necessity everywhere. Those are not conditions exclusive to small towns.”